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Friday, 1 February 2013

a/Sign..

“This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many ... and to be a sign that will be opposed"Luke 2:34

ReadingLuke 2:22-40

Contradiction. This child will be a sign of contradiction to the world, this child will usher in the falling and rising, hidden to the revealed. This child is Jesus Christ, who brought in contradiction, he contradicted everything in the world. He is "...a Stumbling block..." (1 Cor 1:23) to the world, because he subverts and inverts the world. Rising will be falling in him and falling will be rising (Mk 9:35). "The way things are counted in the kingdom confounds the calculations of the “world.” If your brother offends you seven times a day, you should forgive him, and that still holds even if he offends you seven times seventy, which seems excessive. If one sheep among a hundred is lost and then found, there is more rejoicing over that one than over the ninety-nine, which is an unaccountably odd way to count, since there is more profit in the ninety-nine and the one is not worth the risk to the ninety-nine, as any cost accountant, who knows how to calculate risks, can assure us. In the kingdom there is an odd predilection for reversals: the last shall be first, sinners are preferred to the righteous, the stranger is the neighbor, the insiders are out."1John Caputo says that Christians have a "deadly serious concern to contradict the world." Are we playing safe? are we afraid to contradict anyone in the world? are we pleasing men more than Christ? then there is a serious lack in our commitment to the sign who is a contradiction to the world. We are called to become a/Sign.___________________________________1. John Caputo "The Poetics of the Impossible and the Kingdom of God", Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward (MA: Blackwell, 2001), 471.